


Dragon Ball NextGenWeek - Day 6 - Goten

by indevan



Series: Dragon Ball NextGenWeek 2019 [6]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Angst, Getting Together, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 17:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18451454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: When Goku leaves at the end of Z, Goten feels down on himself and not good enough





	Dragon Ball NextGenWeek - Day 6 - Goten

It was supposed to be a good day.  Goten stared at his ceiling, watching the darkness spread over it as the sun sank below the horizon outside.  They should stop going to the Tournament.  The last time he went, he lost the junior division to Trunks and then the world ended.  This time, he was humiliated by his four-year-old niece and.  His father left.

Again.

Something only a little bad or embarrassing and then something cataclysmic.  Not as bad as the end of the world, right?  Not as bad as having to watch his mother get turned into an egg and killed.  Not as bad as having the weight of the world put on his shoulders at age seven.  Gohan had told him about how he went to Namek as a kid to get the dragon balls and how that was where he first met Frieza.  He had been five and he never really thought about how fucked up that was.  And how fucked up it was that he and Trunks had the fate of humanity, of the universe, placed upon them.  They were fucking kids, for Dende’s sake.

But now they weren’t.

Maybe his dad saw that.  Maybe that was why he left.  He wasn’t needed anymore.  Maybe.  Goten never quite got his logic.  Everyone talked about how alike they were, but he didn’t fully see it beyond the physical--and even that was lessened by the fact that he had grown his hair out.  He said he was training Uub to be the protector of Earth, because Goten was fine to depend on when he was a child, but now that he was grown up, apparently he wasn’t good enough.

He exhaled, trying to force the anger out.  His dad was hard to stay mad at.  He was goofy and good-natured and laidback, except when he wasn’t.  He had seen him in a fight, seen him get serious.  He heard Vegeta once say that that was the difference between Goku and Kakarrot.  Either way, Goten thought of him as his dad, so he thought it didn’t matter.  At the end of the day, he would be back to being the guy who put him on his shoulders and ran around making horse noises.

Maybe it wasn’t the leaving.  His dad would be back, wouldn’t he?  He didn’t even say good-bye to his mom and there was no way she would let him off that easily.  But if he didn’t come back...

Goten closed his eyes against the growing darkness and exhaled again.  He couldn’t place the emotions he was feeling and he didn’t like that.  He liked simple and plain emotions and everything had been too muddled lately in ways that had nothing to do with The Leaving.  Abandonment.

Before, it was easy.  His dad was dead.  He couldn’t come back, didn’t want to, until he felt he had to.  Sometimes Goten thought that, if he knew about him, maybe he would come to meet him.  Maybe getting to see him made him want to come back and stay.  Until now.  Until he thought no one needed him and had gotten restless.

Untils and maybes.  He opened his eyes and felt his night vision begin to settle.  The gloom in his room wasn’t so dark now.  He could feel the last fingers of light slither down behind the trees as night settled on the mountain.  The house was quiet.  Gohan had gone back to his, closer now that he wasn’t living in the city in Mr. Satan’s house.  Settled in next door so they could be a big, happy family.  He couldn’t hear any noise from there.  Sometimes, when he tried, he could hear them having dinner or the low murmur of conversation between him and Videl.  Nothing really specific that he could use for potential sibling blackmail to get what he wanted.

In his own house, he could hear his mother sniffling down the hall.  He thought maybe she was crying, but he didn’t know how to comfort her any better now than he did when he was little and every May would see her and Gohan fall into a mournful depression.  At least, then, he could try by crawling into her lap and putting his head on her shoulder.  Now, he was way too tall and big and, other than the hair, looked painfully like his father to the point where he figured it would just upset her.

So he just laid in bed with his weird thoughts, trying not to spiral.  In the distance, he felt a warm pulse of ki.  Goten sat up, wondering if it was his father already.  He was coming back to say that he could use instant transmission to get to where Uub was and train when he wanted to and he was going to stay here.  He was going to stay home and Goten didn’t have to be in this weird, wandering state.  The ki grew closer and, thus, stronger, and his shoulders dropped.  Typically, it was hard to tell who energy belonged to when it was sensed.  Impressions could be made from the overwhelming strength of it (like his father’s or Vegeta’s), but no one’s ki had a particular signature.  At least, that was how Gohan taught it to him, but Goten never really bought that.  His father’s was wide and hot to the point where, if he closed his eyes when he was nearby enough, he felt it against his eyelids.  Vegeta’s was so hot it felt almost cold on his nose and tongue and sharp, like it prickled.  Gohan’s furled like vines and slowly bloomed upwards.  Piccolo said it was a gift he had in particular but Goten was certain that even without this supposed gift, he would know this person’s ki anywhere.

He wasn’t sure how to aptly describe Trunks’s ki except that he could pick out his energy signature at any place and any time.  That Trunks from the future had it, too, but it was slightly off as if the brainwaves were difference or the energy they created was drawn from somewhere else.  A different emotion or something someone smarter than Goten was (like Gohan) could figure out more easily.

Speaking of muddled thoughts…

Usually, things with him and Trunks were the same as they always were, but something somewhere along the line had changed.  A month ago, or so, it was the boys from the beach.

“Hey.”

Trunks was at his window, nose pugged against the glass and his eyes glowing with phosphorescence in the purple-gray of dusk.  To anyone else, he would have looked like a vampire, wanting to be invited in.

“Come outside.”

Reverse vampire, then.  Goten looked at him, at the thin pane of glass separating the two of them.  At the way his breath fogged the glass and made his mouth difficult to see.  He nodded and pushed the window up before dropping down on the grass.  It was already cool underneath his bare feet, the edges of the blades scraping him only a little.

Without a word having to be spoken, they flew to the edge of where the trees were, far enough away not to be heard by anyone except maybe Gohan.  The trees were black, sticking up like jagged fangs into the purpling sky.  Trunks followed their height with his eyes and then his head, tilting his chin up to look at the night sky.

“I forget how many stars there are out here,” he said.

In West City, there was too much smog and pollution.  Bulma told them that, when she was in school, sometimes gym would be canceled because you couldn’t be outside for too long.  It was better now with the clean air laws King Furry put into effect, which kind of sucked because Goten would have really liked to not have to go to gym sometimes and have to pretend that he got winded running laps around the track.

“Yeah,” he said.

This wasn’t why Trunks was here.  When the exhibitions were over and everyone laughed, Goten and his mother had left so abruptly.  Trunks was probably worried.

He looked at him in the darkness, clearer to his Saiyan eyes.  Shadow and light like a movie star on a big screen.  Celluloid slick and unfairly attractive.

That was why he was jealous of the boys from the beach, after all.

It wasn’t that Goten was inexperienced.  His mother thought he was and he liked to keep it that way but since he finally got her to let him go to school in the city with Trunks, he had run the gamut of high school relationships and pratfalls.  Real teen stuff.  No save the world duties.  He had even slept with a couple of girls.  But those boys.

They had been hitchhiking home from the beach because Trunks forgot his capsule speeder and he didn’t want to take the bus back.  He had stuck his hip out and then his thumb and Goten found himself thinking he was cute like that with dried salt from the sea on his shoulders and sand in his hair.  The boys who pulled up went to their school and knew them.  Instead of taking them back to Capsule Corp, they took them to one of their houses and invited them into the hot tub.

“You sure about that?”

“Dunno.”

He couldn’t lie to Trunks.  He knew him too well, knew him better than he knew himself, which was why the muddled thoughts sucked.  Which was why he couldn’t even properly spiral about his dad ditching him and his family in the middle of what was supposed to be a good day.

Trunks gave a slight smirk like he caught him, and Goten wanted to be mad but he didn’t see his best friend smirking at him at night at the edge of the woods after this long-ass day.  He saw Trunks in the hot tub with one of the boys, slipping his hand under the boy’s hair and kissing him.  Watching their bodies move up and down in the water while Goten and the other boy sat there, holding sweating bottles of beer.

Trunks came out to him before he came out to his parents, he remembered, and Goten had understood then and understood it more later when he realized that he was also attracted to men.  He had been jealous that day, but not of Trunks for nabbing the cute one while Goten was stuck sitting with his straight friend.  He had felt that flash of envy for the boy and how he held Trunks at the base of his head while they kissed.

Goten had never had an issue with realizing he was bi, but he had an issue with realizing that he was falling for his best friend.  It was clichéd and dumb and he couldn’t believe he had ended up here, when Trunks clearly didn’t reciprocate his feelings.

“He’ll be back.” A pause. “My dad thinks he’ll be back.”

And, strangely enough, no one would know him better.

“It isn’t that,” he said. “Not really.  I guess it’s why he left.  To train Uub.  Because, what am I?”

Vocalizing made it easier to say.  He wasn’t a good enough fighter.  He cared more about dating and partying than training and his dad couldn’t relate to him anymore so he zeroed in on someone new.  Or at least he would until Pan got a little older and then that Uub kid would be left with a lot of training and not much else.

“What are you?” Trunks scoffed. “Goten, please.  You’re incredible.”

He didn’t expect such bald honesty or.  He did, but not in this regard where Trunks was saying nice things and not just being blunt and bullheaded.

“What?”

“You are.  And your dad knows it.  This thing with Uub has to with him, not you.  Mom says it’s a midlife crisis.”

He could see that.  Maybe.  It made him feel a bit better at least.  His mind was still stuck on “incredible.”

“You think I’m incredible?”

Trunks nodded, took a step forward so he was out of the shadows of the trees.  He could see him more clearly now, in simple darkness.  Night had settled in fully, now.

“You are.  Like, the way you talk about how you want to be a nurse.  How you’re always agonizing about letting down someone if they like you and you’re not feeling it, ‘cause you don’t want to hurt them.  You care about other people.  And you’re strong as hell.” He smirked. “Almost as strong as me.”

Goten wanted to shove him, partially for that last part and partially for those compliments.

“Seriously, though.  You’re wonderful and sweet and amazing and hot and--” Trunks widened his eyes and shut his mouth.

“I’m what?”

He thought of his cliché and didn’t think it’d get this far.  Cinematic.  RomCom.  Trunks smirked again.

“Dude, you’re hot.  You know you are.”

He was trying to recover, Goten realized, for admitting something.

“Trunks…”

“I just wanted to check on you,” he said too quickly. “To make sure you weren’t spiraling.”

Which he was.  Sort of.

But Trunks was on the brink of saying something else.  He could feel it.  Or maybe it was his own feelings blurring it.  Hope.  Desire.

“You said I was wonderful,” he said, choosing his words deliberately as he spoke. “I don’t...want to overthink that.  What did you mean?”

Trunks looked at him, eyes glowing stunningly at night in a way that somehow made them even more captivating than they were during the day.  He could tell, just barely in the gloom, that he was blushing.  He was embarrassed.

“You never get embarrassed around guys,” Goten said. “What gives?”

He didn’t want to hope.  Didn’t want this on top of the day he had.  Trunks could have looked away, but he didn’t.  He rolled his lips in for a moment before releasing them.

“What gives is that I’m totally in love with you,” he said.

Goten wanted to say so much in return.  Wanted to kiss him like that boy in the hot tub.  Hold him by the back of his skull so the ends of his silky hair can brush on the back of his knuckles and the shorter bits against the scalp could feel like feathers on his palm.

“Since when?” he asked instead.

“Dunno.  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t,” he admitted and he tried to be nonchalant but Goten picked up the slight tremor in his voice.  The blush still evident, unable to hide from his keen eyes in the dark.

“Oh.” He paused.  Waited. “Kiss me?”

In another universe maybe he was better with words, but after today, after this confession, he just wanted a kiss.  Trunks cupped his face with both hands and kissed him, full lips against Goten’s.

The kiss was fireworks, bells.  It was nothing he had felt before.  As they kissed, he felt Trunks’s ki, warm and familiar and flared his enough so they could meet.  Trunks’s ki was familiar as a favorite piece of clothing you never outgrew.  It was like fresh baked cake.  It was like his own heartbeat, only slightly different.  Enough of a variance to be unique.

They broke apart and Goten gave a slight smile.  Trunks gave one back.

“Feeling a bit better?” he asked.

“I...I think so.”

His dad would be back.  He was certain of it now.  And, when he did come back, he could tell him about this.  Tell everyone.  Eventually.  Right now, he didn’t want to think about his father or Uub or anything else.  He wanted this moment alone, kissing Trunks again.


End file.
